Mirror Mirror III: The Voyeur

Mirror, Mirror 3: The Voyeur (1995)

Dir. Rachel Gordon, Virginia Perfili

Written by Steve Tymon

Starring Billy Drago, Mark Ruffalo, David Naughton, Monique Parent

As you have perhaps gathered by this point, I have something of a weakness for franchises, and for grinding them out to the bitter end. Early on I reviewed the entire PUMPKINHEAD and HELLRAISER sagas, then Hammer’s FRANKENSTEIN sequence, and more recently, I watched every single fucking RINGU and JU-ON sequel, a fate which I mercificully spared you from having to suffer through with me. I also spared you from reviews of MIRROR MIRROR 1 and 2, 90’s direct-to-video filler about a haunted mirror so bereft of worth that it didn’t seem worth bringing up. But then MIRROR MIRROR 3 showed up during October, and you know I’m honor-bound to review every movie I see in October, no matter how obscure or worthless, even if it takes me a whole year like it did last year because of laziness, physical infirmary, pontification, etc.

So, lucky you! You get to hear about MIRROR MIRROR 1-3 all in one breathless, ecstatic binge, to bring you up to speed! What’s that, you say, you don’t care at all? What if I sweetened the deal a little by mentioning that beloved Hollywood superstar Mark Ruffalo (MIRROR MIRROR 2: RAVEN’S DANCE, MIRROR MIRROR 3: THE VOYEUR) is in parts 2 and 3? That do anything for ya? Probably didn’t do much for his career, but if it was reason enough for me to watch ‘em, surely it’s reason enough for you to read about ‘em?

MIRROR MIRROR 1 is mostly pretty boring, it’s just the story of a angsty high school girl (Rainbow Harvest, a couple TV movies in the 90’s*) and her dysfunctional mom (Karen Black, Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE, IT’S ALIVE III: ISLAND OF THE ALIVE) who move into a new house and discover an obviously evil mirror which gives the daughter mild Carrie-like powers to punish her enemies (including GROUNDHOG DAY alum and one-time Seagal adversary Stephen Tobolowsky) in fairly dull psychic ways. BLADE RUNNER’s William Sanderson and CELLAR DWELLER/THE TEN COMMANDMENTS Yvonne De Carlo are in there too, but there’s pretty much nothing interesting or fun there, just a low-budget no-imagination 1990’s Carrie ripoff with ugly overlit lighting like they did in the 90’s. (Alternate opinion: “I loved this movie!!! 'smiles'... Rainbow Harvest was erotic and powerful in this one. I'd have to say this movie is her best. She's all goth/punk if you will, she's hot. I like the plot, its kind of '80's but its a cool flick... I recommend this movie to anyone who enjoys Gothic erotica or just plain fun…” -- IMDB commentator Jade-30 from Florida, 18 January 2003.)

But MIRROR MIRROR 2: RAVEN’S DANCE gets interesting. It’s still ugly and cheap and garish and 90’s, but rather than just follow its predecessor’s CARRIE ripoff structure, MIRROR MIRROR 2 strikes out on its own and creates a… plot, I guess, (?) which I would argue is pretty unique. Or at least, I would argue that, were it decipherable enough to tell what it’s actually about to begin with. You know it's a pretty good movie when 50 minutes in, I was still grappling with basic questions like "wait, where is this set, exactly? Is this, like, a nunnery / mansion / dance studio / punk band practice space?" Let’s take a look at the conversation me and my stalwart franchise buddy Dan P had afterwards, trying to interpret what we had just seen:

And all that is before I even mention that Mark Ruffalo (Brian Yuzna’s THE DENTIST, in only his second film appearance) shows up as a mysterious teenager who is always sneaking into the protagonist’s (Tracy Wells, the beloved role of “Schoolchild” in GREMLINS) room at night to say ambiguous and vaguely insinuating things to her. Well, you’ve seen a movie before, so you know he’s obviously the physical personification of the evil mirror which is trying to seduce her to evil. And she knows it too, so eventually she up and stabs him. But then it turns out he’s not related to the mirror, he’s just some local weirdo who spends his time sneaking into church orphanages (?) at night and chatting up whoever he finds in an elliptical but subtly menacing way. Huh. Also Roddy McDowell is in there. And Veronica Cartwright. And William Sanderson is back as a different character, a mentally ill custodian/groundskeeper who is enlisted to gaslight our heroine and is filled with remorse and rips the heads off his extensive doll collection but then feels bad and tapes them back on. It’s a weird movie, but the more I think about it the more I’ve convinced that it may actually be some kind of dada masterpiece. Well worth your time. Thumbs up.

MIRROR MIRROR 3, our main dish this evening, continues the tradition of radically changing up the formula, in this case going even more starkly minimalist in the plot department. How do you top a movie where it’s not even clear what the basic setting is, let alone why or how any Ravens are dancing? Well, by substituting any remaining remnants of ostensible horror movie for a long string of softcore sex scenes with various nude women riding a mostly-out-frame Billy Drago (INVASION USA, THE UNTOUCHABLES), who’s a producer on the film for whatever reason. Considering how little he actually figures into these scenes (he’s barely visible laying on the floor or bed while the camera pervs out on the boobs halfheartedly swaying above him), you could probably have shot all his sex scenes (and hence, 50% of the movie or more) with a double and saved a little cash on your big star, which you would think he would be in favor of, as a producer. But fortunately Billy Drago is a real pro and knew that the actresses’ sense of the scene would be seriously undermined if he did some diva shit like that, so for the good of his craft it looks like he stayed for every one of these scenes. Probably even multiple takes, that’s what kind of artistically generous big famous movie star Billy Drago is. Good to see some professionalism in this industry from time to time.

Unfortunately --or maybe fortunately?-- it’s the only professionalism anywhere in the movie, which is a hilariously uneventful dreamy 90’s mess of empty, overlit rooms --some of them with an evil mirror in there which sits around looking evil without specifically doing anything-- and an inexplicably convoluted series of flashbacks to what I can only think to call "the real plot", since nothing actually happens during the ostensible A-story. The nothing that happens is: Billy Drago moves into a mansion which used to be owned by his former lover, who was murdered by her drug-dealer boyfriend two months earlier. He then spends his time having sex with his new girl, but also sometimes the ghost of his old girlfriend comes along to judgmentally also have sex with him, and sometimes we see flashbacks of them having sex in the past. Mark Ruffalo (A FISH IN THE BATHTUB) returns to the series in a hilariously pointless role as his shifty younger brother who also has sex with one or both of the women, so yay for you, you get to see that if you can make it to the climax of the movie. Also David Naughton (AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, THE SLEEPING CAR) is on hand, continuing his Shogun-like quest to wander the Earth proving that even when he’s only got a worthless supporting role in absolute unmitigated shit DTV 90’s softcore movies, he’s still irresistibly charming for some reason. At least he gets to walk with a cane here, that’s new for him.

Anyway, that’s it, that’s the whole movie. There’s an ongoing series of flashbacks which gradually explain the non-mystery about what happened with the drug dealer girlfriend and serve to fill the movie out to feature length, so I guess they're valuable in that regard. But I am not exaggerating when I say the movie is mainly softcore Billy Drago sex scenes where nude women straddle him in a room with that mirror from MIRROR MIRROR 1 and 2 off in the corner. I guess the mirror is probably the titular “Voyeur” here, because it spends a lot of time watching people have sex but doesn’t really do anything except sit there and provide a different motivated Point-of-view angle and occasionally leak some blood that no one notices. At the end I think it eats somebody like in PRINCE OF DARKNESS, but I can’t help but notice that to the extent there is any conflict at all here, it comes from the ghost girlfriend and her annoyance that Billy Drago is banging some blonde in her house two freakin’ weeks after she died. If the mirror is secretly the criminal mastermind behind the drug deal gone wrong or whatever I sure didn’t pick up on it, and the only official plot description I could find for the movie is only 6 lines long, so maybe they didn’t know either.

Here we see our beloved evil mirror, sort of the Freddy or Chucky of this series, ostensibly the villain but so universally beloved we can't help returning to it again and again. Remember those innocent years in the 90's when this mirror turned up everywhere and all the kids had toys of it and dressed as the mirror for Halloween and it had that hilarious series of cameos on Married With Children and all that? Man, the 90's were great.

To compensate for not having a story of any kind, co-directors Virginia Perfili (Special effects on MIRROR MIRROR, graduating to co-writer on MM2, and now co-director here, and also I think it worth noting that her one other directorial effort is a movie called “BIKINI WITNESS”) and Rachel Gordon (director of films with titles such as DUNGEONS OF DESIRE and ANIMALS ATTRACTION III, but obviously most beloved for her one acting role as “severed head” in 1991’s NUDIST COLONY OF THE DEAD) appear to have decided to make the film as visually scattershot as it is narratively sparse. Much of the film (and particularly all the flashback footage) is composed of every type of video effect 1995 was capable of producing, from stretched images to color-corrected nonsense to endless inversed footage of an unidentified car driving through Los Angeles. Fuckers think they’re Oliver Stone here. I would like to assure them definitively that they are not. It's pretty brazen stylistically though; the title doesn't even appear until a solid 18 minutes in. Power moves.

Anyway, you don’t care about that, you want to know about the Ruff. I get that. The good news is that Ruffalo’s ineffable Ruffaloisms are already in full effect by this time, and he gets all the twitchy, eccentric babbling you could want. The bad news is that Hollywood had not yet figured out how to film them so he doesn’t look like a total goofball. Probably doesn’t help that he has nothing whatsoever to do in this movie except be a small part of one sex scene. Not that anyone else is much better served. Frankly, although there is a ghost, this is barely a horror movie, and in fact barely a movie at all, let alone a MIRROR MIRROR movie, not that it would be any great shakes if it was. It’s terrible and baffling, but not in a stunning way like part 2, more in a 90’s softcore cinemax kinda way. A lot more like that, actually. You’ll be sorry to know that we have been so far unable to locate any copy of the fabled MIRROR MIRROR 4: REFLECTION (yes, that’s the real subtitle) so I cannot tell you if the series gets any better.** But I can tell you that Billy Drago returns in a new role! I’m sure that he found his experience on MIRROR MIRROR 3 so ...artistically satisfying... that he couldn’t resist returning one more time.*** This may be a really shitty franchise, but at least it’s inspiring to know that you got folks like Billy Drago out there who care enough about their craft to put in the legwork.

APPENDIX A: Alternate opinions:

“UGh [sic] all it is is these 2 people having sex for an hour and a half then some people die. The mirror does look the same as in the other films but that does not matter.” -- IMDB commentator whammy666 [very possibly Renny Harlin using a pseudonym] from United States, 13 February 2005

“Mark Ruffalo's half-naked body is the only reason I stuck with this… Literally one of the most dumbfounding experiences I've had watching a movie. Monique Parent spends virtually the entire film naked, so there's that, and Ruffalo also shows his body off at the end, serving as proof that he's always looked great.” --- IMDB commentator Robert_Lovelace from New York, NY, United States, 7 July 2016

“One point worth mentioning: Billy Drago is in it. He was absolutely great as the vicious bad guy Ramon Cota in "Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection". But let's face it: besides that, his career is not great.” --- Anonymous IMDB commentator from Belgium, 23 February 2010

*IMDB Trivia: Many are surprised to know that her real name is indeed "Rainbow Harvest".

**It doesn’t have enough ratings to even list an IMDB star ranking, so I don’t think I’m the only one who can’t seem to find it. I think it may well have played only a time or two on cable and never become available for home viewing.

***EDIT: in early 2017, my buddy Dan Prestwich actually bought the "MIRROR MIRROR boxset" which contains all four films, even the mysterious and otherwise unavailable MIRROR MIRROR 4: REFLECTION. Yes, I have seen it. No, I don't want to talk about it.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	Forbidden desires are unleashed ...and unspeakable evil is watching. Well, I don’t know how “forbidden” normal vanilla cis sex with a steady partner is, but I guess an unspeakable evil IS watching. It just doesn’t really do anything, because it’s an evil mirror and can’t even touch itself.
TITLE ACCURACY	There are a few shots of a mirror, but calling this MIRROR, MIRROR is laughable. We do get a few shots of the mirror’s perspective while people bone, so I guess that’s the Voyeur part? Sure as hell don’t know what else it would be.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Ha.
SEQUEL?	Yup, and followed (supposedly) by MIRROR MIRROR 4: REFLECTION
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Haunted/ Cursed Item, I guess. Realistically, “erotic thriller”
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, because Mark Ruffalo wasn’t famous yet. But now, Mark Ruffalo.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	David Naughton!
NUDITY?	Constant
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Ruffalo finds a stuffed Raven in a cupboard while he spends a whole scene dancing and making a peanut butter jelly sandwich. He seems happy to see it, perhaps remembering the raven imagery in part 2. But while it does provide a lame jump scare, it does not attack or come to life or anything.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Definitely a ghost, possibly a haunted mirror which never does anything
POSSESSION?	Surprisingly no, just regular haunting.
CREEPY DOLLS?	No dolls, or even furniture of any kind except beds for fucking and that stupid mirror.
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	The movie is called “The Voyeur,” which I guess translates to the mirror sitting in the bedroom watching people fuck, but never doing anything.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Not all franchises are created equal, but if they go on long enough eventually one of the later sequels will have an embarrassing early performance from an actor who will go on to be beloved and famous and that will keep them from ever entirely slipping into obscurity.

Sadako vs Kayako

Sadako vs Kayako (2016)

Dir Kōji Shiraishi

Written by Takashi Shimizu and Koji Suzuki

Starring Mizuki Yamamoto, Tina Tamashiro

When I heard they were doing a SADAKO (THE RING) vs KAYAKO (THE GRUDGE) crossover spectacular, I was so excited I went back and watched literally every movie in both franchises. It seemed like a lark, until I started to realize exactly how much legwork that would entail. On the SADAKO/ RING side --adapted from the series of novels by Koji Suzuki--, you got THE RING: KANZENBAN* (1995), RINGU (1998), RASEN (1998), RINGU 2 (1999), RING 0: BIRTHDAY (2000), SADAKO 3D (2012), SADAKO 3D 2 (2013), and finally SADAKO VS KAYAKO, the film we find ourselves concerned with today. Oh, and also a Korean version from 1999 called RING: VIRUS. Feeling tired yet? I hope not, because we’re just getting started. On the GRUDGE (or, as it’s typically rendered from the Japanese, JU-ON) side, we have the two shorts that started it all, KATASUMI and 4444444444, both from 1998, followed by JU-ON: THE CURSE and JU-ON: THE CURSE 2 for Japanese TV in 2000. Then we have JU-ON: THE GRUDGE (2002) and its sequel JU-ON: THE GRUDGE 2 (2003). Then in 2009, JU-ON: WHITE GHOST and Ju-ON: BLACK GHOST, two spin-offs. Then in 2014 came JU-ON: THE BEGINNING OF THE END (perhaps the single most suspect horror subtitle since FREDDY’S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE tried to convince us it would be the last time we saw our beloved slasher icon), which was followed by its sequel, JU-ON: THE FINAL CURSE, in 2015. And that brings us around to 2016 again, and SADAKO VS. KAYAKO. Oh, but we’re not done yet. Because there are also three American remakes of RINGU --THE RING, RING 2, and RINGS in 2002, 2005, and 2016, respectively. And not to be outdone, there are also three American remakes of the JU-ON franchise, those being THE GRUDGE (2004), THE GRUDGE 2 (2006), and THE GRUDGE 3 (2009).

Now, to confuse you just a little more: None of the JU-ONs have any obvious direct continuity with each other, they’re just an endless, endless death march of near-exact recitations of the same basic concept (and, often, the exact same fucking events) dragged out over the three increasingly agonizingly sequel pairs over the course of ten plus years. Only WHITE GHOST and BLACK GHOST stand out as being even remotely different; pretty much every other JU-ON movie is basically a faithful remake of the previous one, creating some sort of hideous human centipede of escalating repetition, milking the exact same concept and images completely dry. What is this brilliant fucking concept, you ask, that demanded new artists (and, often, series creator Takashi Shimizu) return to this same fucking thing again and again? Well, there’s this house, that’s haunted. And there’s a boy there, who stands behind you and meows like a cat, and then this lady with a broken neck crawls down some stairs and makes a gurgling noise. The end. EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. After the original two made-for TV sequels JU-ON: THE CURSE 1 and 2 in 2000, there is almost no new content in the entire series, and often even less. BEGINNING OF THE END somehow manages to rehash the exact same beats from its predecessor of nearly 15 years prior and yet still do even less with them. In 11 movies over 18 years, the JU-ON series has demonstrated an almost zen-like ability to utterly avoid any new ideas whatsoever, in a way which would be almost inspiring were it not so completely soul-deadening to watch. (The second of those two classic characters, incidentally, is Kayako --who we will eventually return to herein-- and obviously this idea that she crawls down stairs and gurgles is so endlessly fascinating it had to be explored in an impressive five remade sequel pairs, and now a crossover spectacular.) Oh, and if you think 11 movies was enough, don’t forget: there’s also novelizations of seven of the films, three comic adaptations, one graphic novel, and a 2006 American short film entitled TALES FROM THE GRUDGE. And a video game; presumably one where the protagonist walks endlessly around the same dull suburban house and gets meowed at.

The RING / SADAKO side of things is a little more twisted. Koji Suzuki’s novels, it seems, did not make for literal sequels; they turn meta and weird almost immediately. The movies sort of followed suit: the first sequel, RASEN, gradually dumps most of the mythos established in its predecessor in favor of some kind of crazy sci-fi apocalyptic virus metaphor. But then when no one liked that, series creator Hideo Nakata made a more direct sequel, RINGU 2, which ignores the events of RASEN and establishes a new continuity. RING 0: BIRTHDAY is a prequel to RINGU 2, of course, also based on a Suzuki story but not the same Suzuki story. But then 2012 brought a sequel not to RINGU 2 and RING 0, but to the original disowned RASEN in the form of SADAKO 3D, establishing a second canonical line of sequels which include RINGU 1, RASEN, SADAKO 3D, SADAKO 3D 2, and, of course, the film of the hour here, opposed by the alternate timeline of RINGU, RING 2, and RING 0: BIRTHDAY. And of course, neither of those two competing series includes either the original Japanese TV production or the Korean version, nor do any of them necessarily directly spring from the five Suzuki novels in the series, the manga, The American RING series, the two TV serieses (not to be confused with the TV movie) or the two video games. Confused? Let this helpful flow chart from wikipeda sort things out into a nice visually clear…

Oh. Nevermind.

By now you’ve probably forgotten why we ever started talking about this. Believe me, more than once during the many dark hours I spent grinding through GRUDGE sequels, I forgot there was ever once a world of happiness and meaning, let alone a specific reason I was doing this. But I made it through, and then I saw SADAKO VS KAYAKO. I did it. I survived.

I don’t need to tell you that it wasn’t worth it. Oh my sweet salty Jesus, no way in hell was it worth it. But after the nightmare of watching all the almost completely identical and grindingly unimaginative GRUDGE and RINGU/SADAKO serieses, I’m happy to report that SADAKO VS KAYAKO is the first evidence in either series that someone actually gets it. Duh, having two essentially identical long-haired female Japanese ghosts who curse you is already a pretty creatively barren idea, and teaming them up has the potential to be a hilariously dire exercise in seeing how much nothing you can put on the screen and still have it add up to nothing. In fact, the whole thing was first raised as an April Fool’s Day joke, which it arguably could have remained without really making the world significantly poorer for it. But miraculously, director Kōji Shiraishi (the excellent NOROI: THE CURSE [apparently Japan has like fifty synonyms for “curse,” like all the Eskimo words for “snow”]) seems to have approached the concept with the sense of hearty cheer that not a single fucking movie in either series seemed to realize might be a good idea previously. There’s an obvious commitment here to making this comically unnecessary team-up about as much fun as one could possibly have with these two not-especially-fun franchises, and it even manages to poke a little affectionate fun at them too, without slipping into parody. I never thought I’d be saying this about a RING or GRUDGE movie, but it’s a pretty entertaining, dumb time at the movies, and that’s certainly the absolute best possible scenario imaginable here.

A big part of its success is that it seems to inherently recognize that of our two basically interchangeable long-haired Japanese female ghosts, Sadako is obviously the more dynamic one. Sadako, you’ll recall, is the “Ring” girl (an adult in the Japanese version, so don’t get confused if you remember her as a child from the Naomi-Watts starring American remake) who got tossed into a well and now gets her revenge on the world through a haunted video that dooms you to a death at Sadako’s hands in a few days when she climbs out of a TV screen at you. Of the two basic conceits, that’s definitely more interesting than “crawls downstairs and gurgles,” and so, fittingly, SADAKO VS KAYAKO chooses to foreground Sadako, at least for the majority of the runtime, at maybe a ratio of 3:1. It doesn’t entirely ignore Kayako, who gets her own bodycount fairly early, but this is primarily the story of Yuri (Mizuki Yamamoto, THE BLACK BUTLER), a university student who has to try to get to the bottom of this Sadako business when her friend Natsumi (Aimi Satsukawa, THE SAMURAI I LOVED) mistakenly watches the cursed video. This leads her to a surprisingly rock n’ roll exorcist named Keizō Tokiwa (Masanobu Ando, BATTLE ROYALE, SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO) and his caustic, blind child sidekick, who eventually come around to the idea that the most practical way to deal with this vengeful supernatural spirit is to pit her against another vengeful supernatural spirit and, you know, see how that all shakes out. Guess who he’s got in mind?

The simplicity of how Kayako and Sadako come to be at odds is a thing of elegant, hilariously blunt beauty. I love it, and that straightforward desire to entertain and not dither with convoluted bullshit is pretty characteristic of the film as a whole. Shiraishi doesn’t waste time with grueling, obvious backstories for the ghosts (like every single fucking sequel in both franchises have focused on up to now), instead opting to just start throwing setpieces at us and expecting us to get the gist of it, which is obviously the right call. It gets down to business quick, but with a subtlety playful quality that offers appreciation to the two franchises without necessarily making itself a slave to their more trying aspects. First sign you’re in good hands: the cursed “Ring” video -- usually a labored showpiece, even though virtually every version other than the first one sucks-- is coyly hidden for most of the movie; we see people’s reactions to it, but don’t see the video itself. Cute. And to give a little much-needed energy, everything is shortened a little; this time around, you only get two days instead of seven before Sadako comes to get you, and the video itself so short that one girl, playing on her phone and looking down, entirely misses it and ends up not being cursed! Take that, people who think you shouldn’t be dual-screening. When the video finally shows up it turns out to be disappointingly direct (no artsy Matthew Barney stuff this time), but at least directness is an improvement over the listless, draggy pace of most of the other movies. Plus, for the first time in either series, we also have some funny, mildly proactive characters who take the whole thing seriously without feeling too fancy to toss in a dry joke or two, which makes even the downtime between ghost attacks much more tolerable (though it wouldn’t be a RING or GRUDGE movie if there wasn’t at least a little draggy downtime).

It’s mostly content to grab bits and pieces from both franchises and use them in any possible way it can think of in order to try and wring out a little entertainment, a strategy which is, if not wildly successful, at least vastly more successful than anything which immediately preceded it in either franchise. It doesn’t get too bogged down with the specific continuity of either ghost, which is fine because they’re not very interesting anyway and any little germs of interest have long ago been run into the ground. But those who suffered through all the previous sequels, take heart: there’s a few subtle inside jokes thrown to you too, including a very funny bit --if you’ve seen 1998’s abortive sequel RASEN or the dully baffling Japanese RINGU 2-- where a character starts pontificating about the nutty mythos of those movies, only to have someone cut him off and just brush it aside with an “Anyway, whatever that meant…” I think that about sums it up. There’s no good reason for it to have come to this, but since we’re here, let’s just dump the clutter and focus on the good stuff.

Obviously when you see a movie with that “vs” in the title, you know you gotta lay down a modest wager to make this interesting. Always one to go for the long shot, I had some money riding on Kayako, just as I did for Freddy in FREDDY VS JASON back in the day. But this is Japan, so of course they end up (SPOILER) cooperating, in a pretty fun and agreeably goofy way where they merge together like the two Ron Silvers in TIMECOP and creating a hybrid mutant ghost named (of course) "Sayako," which would also have been a good celebrity couple name had they chosen that route. Having delivered that final bit of absurdity, the movie quickly dispenses with everyone still alive and drops the mic. The ending feels a tad abrupt, but then again, that also feels right in line with the movie’s general philosophy of getting to the point and then getting out. Which is probably something both franchises could have used about, oh, I dunno, 5 sequels ago, but is nonetheless welcomed now (the audience I saw it with at the AFI Spooky Movie Festival seemed to be having fun, at any rate, even hooting and hollaring a little bit, which would have been pretty much unimaginable in any previous sequel). If SADAKO VS KAYAKO can’t ultimately overcome the handicap of neither source material being, you know, actually good, at least it does a bang-up job building some energetic, enthusiastic trash out of their pieces. Plus, someone finally gives that fucking meowing kid what’s coming to him, and that alone might have been worth sitting through a half-dozen sequels for.

*“Kanzenban,” as nearly as I can tell, is a word which describes a particular type of complete collection of individual mangas, so I guess this is implying that it’s the full story, not just one chapter.

To hype the movie, these two titans of horror interrupted a baseball match for a little friendly exposition game, as you can see here. Because Japan.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	The poster says: The Scariest Showdown In Horror History. Well, if you’re gonna lie, at least lie big.
TITLE ACCURACY	100% accurate.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Well, Sadako is a character from Koji Suzuki’s novels, and he did apparently co-write the screenplay along with GRUDGE creator Takashi Shimizu (I say “apparently” because IMBD is a little cagey on the subject, crediting both of them only with “characters” and otherwise giving no screenwriting credit)
SEQUEL?	Yes, arguably the 5th sequential sequel in the RINGU/SADAKO series (and 12th overall) and the 9th sequel in the GRUDGE/JU-ON series (12th overall, discounting the short films)
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Japan
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Ghost / Curse / Crossover!
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Well, Takashi Shimizu probably counts and co-writer/series creator. And apparently both Sadako and Kayako are beloved enough to justify a combined 25 sequels, which is approaching James Bond numbers.
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No, like all the GRUDGE and RINGU movies, sex is never even alluded to, making this perhaps the only non-Godzilla Japanese franchise which has no rape.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Cat jumps out of cabinet for lame jump scare. But I’m pretty sure it’s a ghost cat.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Two ghosts, one haunted house
POSSESSION?	Yeah, which is more or less a new addition to either franchise. Some Grudges had a mild possession element, but this is the first time we’ve seen people go full-on whited-out eyes.
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Natsumi goes a little nutty at the thought of her impending death and may well doom the world, though it’s never brought up again.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yeah, actually (spoiler) Sadako and Kayako merge to become… I dunno, the Vultron of long-haired Japanese vengeful ghosts?
VOYEURISM?	There’s not a lot to see, so no.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Getting cursed in Japan is about as easy as drunkenly finding your way to a karaoke bar, and exactly as hopeless once it happens.